 | Hello all! I am uh no-one of note, but I did write this post about all the changes between FFXIV and Mobile exactly 462 days ago, unintentionally becoming The Mobile Guy for a while after also deciding to take up the mantle of providing patch note translations. I was originally planning to make a post like "One Year of XIV Mobile" back around the anniversary, but due to a lot of other stuff going on and said anniversary being very quiet it fell off my priority tasks. And then shortly afterwards, as you probably know, the death knell was tolled for XIV Mobile. I did not expect I would be living through a second Eorzean apocalypse event, and I won't even get a cool tattoo this time, but I decided with the end of an era approaching in literally just 13 hours from this post I would dust this idea off and let it see the light. What kind of content came to XIV Mobile after the launch? Very famous bug from the first week of Crystal World where a MapEvent was not properly turned off. The launch was very exciting, and lots of little details generated some good buzz. Most notably there was a really positive reception to the mobile adaption of Titan, which really cleverly tied in and remixed mechanics from every version of the fight. With stuff like that and a lot of little adjustments to some dungeons, seeing "What's different" was kind of the most interesting part of the experience for a while. Unfortunately, the answer was very little. First a small breakdown, for context. FFXIV Mobile recieved *three* major patches, with each of those having one or two notable minor patches alongside weekly* updates (that over time became bi-weekly, some weekly, and finally "man its been weeks"-ly) for small stuff. These are Versions 2.1.0, 2.2.0 and our current version 2.3.0. 2.1.0 was strong, and surprisingly adapted all of A Realm Awoken, Through the Maelstom, and Defenders of Eorzea in one go, alongside it's three starring primal battles throughout the story. This set a really unrealistic bar for what to expect in these, considering these patches came out roughly every three-four months. If the game wasn't dead, we'd already be in Heavensward as of last month, just over a year from launch. So obviously, things were cut and shuffled around a bit. 2.1.0 only launched with an EX Leviathan fight, with the other two coming in later updates that created an odd staggered schedule that never went away (2.2.0 didnt even include an EX, just the story Shiva, at initial launch). Going from that, 2.2.0 featured just Dreams of Ice, and 2.3.0 featured the complete Before the Fall 1+2 content, which means I did in fact spend a whole day dealing with ragequit parties in The Chrysalis in big 2026. https://preview.redd.it/vtmeutepbfs...bp&s=06244ec64866dd5b55e39aa75bd80a9b3aa75d36 Onto the specific note of Whats Different though, the answer was sadly nothing. The trend of remixing content for Mobile was not kept up and Mog, Leviathan, Ramuh, Shiva and (presumably) Odin (I can't find groups for *some reason*). If anything, they're notable in that the Hard (story) versions are a bit too steamrollable. Leviathan often dies before the second music track gets a chance to play. So that kinda sucks, but I guess it's fine. On the dungeon-side, since we had a lot of interesting changes there too, there's a lot of potential stuff to go into here and touch up. Now if you read the original changes post, you may remember an odd decision to cut four dungeons from the launch lineup; Cutter's Cry and Dzemael Darkhold from the leveling selection, and both Amdapor Keep and Wanderer's Palace from the level cap dungeons. This did seem like an odd decision at the time, but ARR has tons! of dungeons, an unrecognizable slew of options that would surprise the modern level cap player. ARR added fifteen unique four-man dungeons in Lv50 content across patches, so they had a lot to choose from for what to adapt. So, how many of the patch dungeons made the cut for Crystal World? Two. And yes, there are two dungeons that immediately stand out since they can't not be included, so obviously we are talking about Snowcloak and Keeper of the Lake. And sadly, neither of these feature any significant differences either. The gate before the first boss in Snowcloak is already open but you still need to clear out the enemies to clear the path to the boss. Clearly this extra work was judged not worthwhile over time, which as I said really sucks. I need to stress this point if it didn't occur to you while reading this, but this means that roulette content did not change whatsoever for the entire year+ the game was live. Think about how tuned out you get two months into a new Expert rotation and imagine that scaled to the entire expansion. As far as Raids go, these were a lot more interesting. As seen at the time, these did get some notable changes in the first batch, and especially with the new Normal/Savage splits. Similar to the general flow, T10/11/12/13 were less different, but still balanced out with new markers, tells, more forgiving mechanics in Normal and some harsher changes in Savage. They clearly did take some pride in the high-end offerings in this game, especially with the timed ranking mode competitions they would run with people clearing the fights in Challenge Mode (no markers, no mechanic timeline, no pots, min iLv). There's a lot of footage around online of the Savage versions of these fights which are fun watches, especially if you're familiar with the original fights and you get to go "oh that's different". https://preview.redd.it/0a3guuhflfs...bp&s=c743894c420691a9373ad7bb76af69d01703a296 Lastly, there's the "Alliance" raids. As mentioned at the time, LotA was adapted to an eight-man dungeon that kind of just worked into the gear progression tier. There was some discussion from the devs about shifting towards a 12-Player system, an alliance of three light parties, but this never got implemented. Syrcus Tower featured similar changes to LotA that accommodate the new player count and was a fun time, I think these adaptions were some of the most chaotic fun in the game, which made the player count change hurt less. With that in mind, World of Darkness was a really anticipated addition to close out the last open plot thread in ARR after 2.55 MSQ and Coil's second half. Unfortunately, it DID NOT COME OUT. The writing was on the wall for the game's death for quite some time before the website's death caused a stir in the more prominent spaces, and the updates for the game just disappearing. It was kind of surprising for me that they added Odin's trial at all, considering the attitude towards optional content, but the complete lack of content afterwards was the real death knell. There's a lot of nice little content they didn't even manage to get up onto the cash shop, which I'll touch on soon. this is what i consider the Peak of Crystal World. Gear progression was really weird in this game. Not to get too into the numbers and stuff, but basically you would buy your tome gear and then keep updating it with new content tiers. I mentioned in the original changes post that gear could be upgraded to +1 with drops from Titan? Well, LotA had an item for +2, and then Leviathan had an item for +3, and then Mog had... and so on up until 2.2.0 came out, at which point new tomes meant new gear, which you then went through the same process again with fights from that patch onward, Ramuh, Shiva, Syrcus, Odin.... This probably isn't at mentally grating if you can use the market board to supplement this progression with crafted gear, but for reasons that will be discussed below, if you're reading this - statisically you couldn't. So you will sit there and do the one specific fight you're up to fifteen times or whatever to get enough rocks to make the number go up, then move to the next fight and do the same thing, until you catch up to current content. So that is "Content" in Crystal World. A high bar that was set early and never reached again. There's nothing to really add in the world content. They added some more travelling performer groups, the Gold Saucer added Chocobo Racing (which was smoother than retail, another benefit of New Engine), the Crystalline Conflict addition (again very good and really fun, you will never experience the terror of a monk physically picking you up and tossing you into the exploding lines or being stunlocked by bards launching knockback waves into each other) but overall it kept the same "XIV but on your phone" comfy vibe. So, for the sake of post engagement, let's shift to more exciting things. Yoshi-P, whens <mobile\_item> please. https://preview.redd.it/5xtgteyirfs...bp&s=736a0fe557f6a25d255b0355614425532f56b9f9 If you're aware of Crystal World but not actually following or interested in the actual game, it is probably because of the cosmetics. XIV Mobile has amassed quite a library of very cool original offerings and I would like to go over the complete collection really quickly here for posterity. First up we have fifteen original hairstyles. Two of them (9 and 10) feature two variants where the jewelry can be disabled, and another two (11 and 12) have six variants with different accessories. The last three were never actually made available and put up on the Cash Shop but can be seen in the Aesthetician. Then of course there are the clothes! They really cast a wide net here with oriental stuff, techwear, funny mascots, whatever. Some sets came with variant options, such as the snowboarder-themed set having alternate body and pants options. These would be included with the purchase and added to the glamour dresser too, so some full outfit sets are actually six or seven pieces. The last two, themed around the chess queen and king, are really cool but didn't ever get released, only being visible in locked glamour dresser slots. Six Cash Shop Outfits, two Seasonal Event outfits, one apology from the Houseageddon, and two unreleased sets. There's also just a lot of other stuff. There's a bunch of mounts, ranging from a penguin carrying you around in a bag and a bird who carries around an egg-shaped two-person carriage, to the sick-as-hell Magitek Skateboard which gradually got more and more visual skins over time you could unlock or buy. There were three unique sets of wings for Fashion Accessories; a set of ice-y wings, and then just Nael and Bahamuts wings. One thing I liked which I didn't ever see much discussion about outside the playerbase was the Mystery Store, a new feature they added to (try to) help monetization. https://preview.redd.it/xg8wtvhy4gs...bp&s=1dddc8896869a222435fe34f258fc0e52e0e5d1b Every day, the Mystery Store would refresh with eight new random items at special prices, including minions, music, furniture, items, emotes, and so on, which made for a really fun dynamic page. The most notable thing about this was that they would also include glamours, and to flesh out the selection they actually made a bunch of variant glamour pieces exclusive to the store's random selections. Some were simple but cool, like alternate colour versions of popular glamours like the maid dress or different printed pattern t-shirts, and others were... sillier. https://preview.redd.it/vdidnqmr6gs...bp&s=9c604beec278cca3b74d010361b0c9db9b3f5068 As you can see, a lot of effort was put in to encourage players to engage with the monetization. Speaking of monetization- Mr Tencent needs Money In the Crystal World timeline, Tataru Taru brings down the Eighth Calamity. MrHappy once said "it sounds like the game will fail before it goes pay-to-win" and it looks like they chose to prove the man right. The developers, in particular our leading man Taiga, was very transparent from the start that there was a lot of pressure on the dev team to keep the game profitable, and a lot of decisions were aimed around keeping this in mind while working around their commitment to keeping pay-to-win elements as far removed from the game as possible. This led to stuff like the very in-depth dying system, the active cash shop rotation with original and old items coming in with first week discounts (glamour-style gear from retail would generally end up on the Cash Shop at lower prices than original cash shop and new-to-mobile items at premium costs), direct purchasing of upgrade items that normally need farming from bosses, the Mystery Store, and so on. Unfortunately, whatever bar was set for them was not met, and thus we're here today. The game faced a lot of issues over the course of its short life and a lot of them were early on. The topic of botting in the game and the massive restrictions that had to be placed on the game to counteract them was a big topic at the time, effectively putting retails free trial restrictions on players until they make some microtransactions. In particular, restrictions to mining/logging attempts and fishing casts per day were really controversial. And yes, I said casts. When they rolled this out, it was per cast not per hook, I was working on Big Fish the day this came out and I got three hooks worth pulling before the game told me to come back tomorrow. https://preview.redd.it/3rv1k500bgs...bp&s=d135ff4418aec4c5e9c89eecef16167c9b524d53 Other than uh, completely calm and composed comments giving feedback about PvP balance on every news post, the most notable catastrophic event was the launch of player housing. When housing first launched around the start of this year, it rolled out with the current lottery ticket system just like most features in mobile being time-appropriate releases but current time content versions. As the first lottery window ended, there was a catastrophic bug where multiple people would win heavily contested plots creating some weird behaviour that stopped any of them from making the house, so they basically had to do a full reset, take everyones houses away even if unaffected, and this was received understandably poorly. They gave out massive amounts of free stuff to make up for this, like the puppy outfit shown above, cash shop vouchers, and for anyone who bought a house they would get a full house refund plus the game would cover the house you originally boughts cost on a new house purchase (eg you spent a million gil on the lost house, you got that million back plus a million gil discount on a new house). There's a height slider on furniture placement in Crystal World so you can just float any item. I took this screenshot among many others and didn't have a better place to put it in this post so I'm putting it here. As the versions went on and more stuff didn't work, the communication from the devs dried up fairly quickly. It was kind of a spiral from there, but the lack of content releases in 2.3.0 as the end of the battle pass period came up was the most clear sign it was probably over. Even before this, players were stuck in a game where as mentioned, the daily content grind does not change, and the only new content that comes out gives you a new rock to upgrade your stuff another tier, so you have to grind out a whole set of rocks for your whole set of gear, and you're left with the very baseline version of the MMO cycle without anything really fun - plus most stuff doesn't work when it comes out, so you begin to have no expectations. Why Can't Retail Have X? I'm not gonna talk at length about the dyes again, we gotta wrap this post up. The big thing ever since launch has been "This sounds good, why can't the main game have this", and it comes down to a lot of factors both technical and practical. There are a lot of very popular features, notably in the cosmetics space. Gear in Crystal World has 16 dye slots and permanent dye unlocks, and all gear can be permanently added to a glamour dresser with a prism. It's been a longtime request of the retail version to have this more permanent glamour wardrobe. In addition, there are the open world events like the travelling performers, the high risk FATEs, the goblin merchant, bicolour gemstones in ARR, so on. A lot of this stuff comes down to "time" and "it would be nice but we could be making new things instead of updating old things". Crystal World has the benefit of being a ground-up remake on a new engine, so all this stuff is built in from the start to be supported, whereas the game built on top of ARR continues to be wonky to this day. That said, there's been some notable updates this year in XIV that seem very familiar. Sure, the Glamour Dresser still has a limit, but they're working on letting you put more and more normal gear into the armoire. If they keep that up with all the dungeon sets, and add raid sets, 24 man sets, etc... well, there's no limit on the armoire, and you can access that equipment from the dresser, so they've kind of taken a more complicated route to get to the same endgoal of the big permanent wardrobe. More notably was the recent changes to dyes, which turned a lot of individual dyes into selectable multi-use items, which is actually how it works in Mobile. In this we have five different pots for the normal colours and then a special one for black/white and more special shades, whereas XIV's new system is actually a lot more convenient with them being separated into entire tiers across a small number of unique items. Now I'm not saying they specifically took this from Mobile/player feedback talking about Mobile, but.............. Some Sort of Conclusion https://preview.redd.it/czojooxakgs...bp&s=cf3bebb790ac94cc66270dc7f93ed7ad308414d2 At the end of the day, regardless of your opinions or enjoyment of Crystal World, it is sad to see a game die. As I mentioned eons ago at the top of this post, I was also around for the end of 1.23b, and I still catch myself thinking about stuff I didn't get to do back then or wanting to mess around with it again, but I can't. The mobile game's combat kits were really nice, and they were built out of the modern equivalent's full skill list. BLM at Lv50 in Mobile manages Enochian (with a timer!! more work than retail!) and Fire/Blizzard IV rotations. So I was genuinely really looking forward to what a big expansion version update would do for a lot of the systems and the already really complete combat loadouts. I was really looking forward to switching my old 2.x era Hyur recreation to the Au Ra I made at HW launch and sitll play as today. I was looking forward to seeing what stuff got changed, or just removed (had a bet with a friend that Dusk Vigil would be cut, now we'll never know). There was also some real technical value out of how this game ran in parallel to the retail version. As mentioned, under the hood this is a full remake on a new engine using all the provided assets from the original work, and I don't know of any situation where there's been a game and its remake both running concurrently as live services, so it was really interesting to compare small details. One of the very first things I did on Day 1 was confirm my favourite FFXIV bug was recreatable, and indeed, you can fish in the stairs in the Limsa Adventurer's Guild. Even though this was a weird flawed, semi-predatory but not predatory enough, content missing, stuck in a foreign language, odd experience of a game's remake while I'm still actively playing the original, I will surely in the future think back on those first alliance raid runs, launch day content with chinese mobile players who have no idea whats going on, the people I met through the ragtag community dodging WHEN GLOBAL posts, and I will be sad that it's over. Thanks for reading, or skimming, or looking at the pictures, or scrolling past the whole message to write "why not mobile subreddit" or whatever. submitted by /u/RablaAndrews [link] [comments] |
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